Make a Raspberry Pirate Radio

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist the urge to make a Raspberry Pi-rate graphic.

Many thanks to SWLing Post reader, Paul, for this article on Make Magazine that teaches you how to turn your Raspberry Pi into an FM transmitter. Make Magazine states that this FM transmitter “has enough range to cover your home, DIY drive-in movie, a high school ball game, or even a bike parade (depending on the stragglers).”

Raspberry Pi’s are very inexpensive (less than $40 US on Amazon) and a fun tool to have around the shack anyway. I plan to try this project as early as this weekend. I have many hours of shortwave radio recordings that I would love to pipe through the house via FM. I only wish the Raspberry Pi could broadcast in AM. Perhaps one day…

Thanks for posting the Raspberry Pirate Radio! Very cool to find this radio blog – it’s great! Send us some pictures of your Pirate Radio if/when you get it up and running. We updated the Project today to include instructions for Windows users to SSH to their Pi, and it should be straightforward for OSX and Linux users. Enjoy the airwaves!

What a great post Thomas – thanks for building and writing up your experience! We’ll be sure to add your build to a future round-up of makers making Weekend Projects.

We also realize the harmonics is an issue and we’re hoping that someone else will – or we will eventually – build a bandpass filter (a la http://www.raltron.com/cust/tools/band_pass_filters.asp ) for the Pirate Radio. Thanks again and yes, SWLing Post is in our RSS reader now – Cheers!